Alien Intrusion Read online

  Let us try to crack this riddle. We will see, in fact, that "2001" does contain a message about reality - one of ultimate importance for every human being.[18]

  Arthur C. Clark

  Clarke is a self-avowed atheist, yet his writings contain supernatural or metaphysical themes. Like the other "most famous" authors I mentioned, his materialistic views dominated his writings. In reality, the movie had overt New Age concepts based in materialism, which has evolutionary philosophy as its "engine room."

  But his reputation rested, in large measure, on his ability to make predictions that became science fact. Even Isaac Asimov said about Clarke, "No one has done more than Clarke in the way of enlightened prediction." [19] One of Clarke's most impressive predictions was the development of space stations and satellites that act as transmitters for radio signals. He made this prediction back in 1945, long before the first space launch. Because of this foresight, he is known as the father of modern satellites. In addition to his literary skill, he is a highly respected science commentator. He co-broadcast the Apollo 11, 12, and 15 missions for CBS, with anchorman Walter Cronkite and astronaut Walter Schirra. He was also past chairman of the British Interplanetary Society and a member of the International Academy of Astronautics, the Royal Astronomical Society, and many other scientific organizations. Such recognition has given him unprecedented stature among science fiction writers, and similarly he has made an enormous impact on the way society views itself. One biographer of Clarke wrote:

  At the heart of every Arthur C. Clarke novel lies a small puzzle with large ramifications. He is an author who takes an idea and drops it into a quiet pool of thought. There's a splash - that's the intriguing nature of Clarke's scientific genius.... He's a science fiction writer whose imaginings reverberate outside the realm of fiction.[20]

  At the Wernher von Braun lecture series held at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in 1997, Clarke was the keynote speaker. After viewing pictures from NASA's orbiting Mars Global Surveyor, he repeated several times that he was serious in suggesting that the pictures showed dense vegetation on Mars.[21] Clarke is a firm believer in life on Mars, and wishes for a manned flight to the planet. He has always expressed his disappointment that manned missions to the moon ceased. Clarke believes that mankind's future will be in the stars, and that the technology is only a matter of time.

  The tyranny of distance

  Sharing the podium with Clarke that evening was Apollo 17 moonwalker Eugene Cernan, who, like Clarke, believes that man will be living on Mars some day. His statements that evening suggested that mankind is on the verge of a new era in space exploration that will overtake our old world very quickly. He remarked that there is little difference between science fiction and science fact, and that the only difference is time, a dimension we know so little about....That's science fiction today, but give us time.[22]

  Although Cernan was suggesting that, in time, the technology to live on Mars would be developed, time is a problem in more ways than one. If man is going to travel to the planets in our solar system, let alone the galaxies, he needs space vehicles that will get him there very quickly. This is also a necessary requirement if the ETH is to have any validity.

  The ability to travel millions of light-years (a light-year is about 5 trillion miles or 8 trillion km) in a matter of hours or days is one of the central concepts in modern science fiction. This differs from most early science fiction stories, which depict the exploration of the earth and its unknown reaches, such as the ocean depths or deep inside the core of our planet. Once these regions became familiar, stories focused on the planets within our solar system. Science fact showed these to be apparently inert and lifeless, or even highly toxic and physically violent to life, so now the focus has shifted to distant stars and galaxies. This pattern has also occurred in UFOlogy: in the early days, many of the supposed alien visitors to Earth were said to be from places such as Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, but nowadays they are said to come from distant star systems like Pleiades, Zeta Reticuli, or Sirius.

  Alien civilizations are presumed to exist because of the realization that this incomprehensibly large universe contains billions upon billions of stars, and possibly a similar number of planets that could be like our Earth. However, contrary to popular expectation, this same enormity makes alien visitations even less likely.

  To understand the scope of this problem, let's take a quick look at the known composition of our universe. The nine planets in our solar system revolve around our sun. The sun is actually a star, similar to others we observe shining in the night sky. It is one of maybe 400 billion such stars in our own galaxy, known as the Milky Way. Then there are possibly billions of galaxies like the Milky Way, each containing billions of stars.

  Now, let us try to comprehend the size of our universe by taking a journey. We are going to need to travel unbelievably fast - at the speed of light, which, according to Einstein's theory of special relativity, is the maximum speed possible (we shall discuss why in a moment). If it were possible to travel at light speed (c), you would be traveling at the astonishing speed of 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second. Taking off, you could circle the earth seven times in one second. Leaving our planet, you would pass the moon in two seconds and Mars in just four minutes, and it would take you only five hours to reach Pluto, the farthermost planet in our solar system. (Earth is 93 million miles

  [148 million km] from the sun and Pluto is around 40 times farther from the sun than we are.)

  Now, let us leave the solar system and travel into the Milky Way. The next closest star is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light-years away. Traveling at 300,000 km every second, it would take you 4.2 years to get there. To traverse our own galaxy, the Milky Way, it would take you about 100,000 years, but upon leaving the Milky Way, it would now take approximately 2,300,000 years to reach Andromeda, the nearest galaxy like our own. The next closest galaxy after that would take us 20 million years to reach - traveling at the speed of light, remember. Yet, we have only just begun to travel the universe, because there are billions more galaxies to visit.[23] There are so many stars in the universe that a human being could not even live long enough to count them all, if that's all he was doing all the time. The vastness of this universe is almost incomprehensible to man - it is hard to believe it exists - yet it is real.

  However, a very strange phenomenon occurs during our journey through the galaxy, because if we could travel at the speed of light, we would arrive at our destination without perceiving any passage of time. But an observer on the earth would observe the passage of years (of course, people don't live that long, but this is a hypothetical analogy). In other words, a return trip to Proxima Centauri would take 8.4 years (actually longer because it would be necessary to speed up and slow down) but you would come back younger than people who remained on the earth. You would not have aged, but they would be 8.4 years older. This is a problem often ignored by science fiction stories and movies. As one UFO skeptic argues:

  Einstein theorized that the maximum speed possible would be c, that is, the speed of light. This is because as our speed increases, our mass increases until at c, our mass becomes infinite. Most people think that because objects become weightless in space, they would be easy to propel, but this is incorrect. Even in space, the more mass an object has, the more energy you need to propel it. To illustrate, let's say that an astronaut is on a space walk and is going to throw two objects. The first object is a one-pound ball and the second object is a 30,000-pound ball. Neither ball weighs anything because there is virtually no gravity up there. If the astronaut has a good baseball arm, he would be able to throw the small ball very fast. However, he would barely budge the large ball. It would feel like he was pushing against a wall. The only movement taking place (apart from a slight movement of the big ball), would be the astronaut moving backward.

  How much energy will it take to propel a spaceship to ultra-high speeds? To keep things easy to visualize, we are going to calc
ulate the energy needed to propel a one-pound object to 50% of the speed of light. The formula to determine this is:

  Kinetic Energy = 1/2 (mass) (velocity) (velocity)

  To propel an object that weighs one pound to a velocity 50% of the speed of light would require an energy source equal to the energy of 98 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. That's a tremendous amount of energy.[24]

  To put the energy requirements into perspective, let's consider some interesting facts about NASA's space shuttle - the most excellent space machine available to us today:

  • It takes only about eight minutes for the space shuttle to accelerate to a speed of more than 17,000 miles (27,358 kilometers) per hour, the velocity required to enter Earth's orbit (escape velocity to leave our planet is 25,000 mph or 40,000 kph).

  • The space shuttle main engine weighs 1/7 as much as a train engine but delivers as much horsepower as 39 locomotives.

  • The turbo pump on the space shuttle's main engine is so powerful it could drain an average family-sized swimming pool in 25 seconds.[25]

  • The space shuttle's three main engines and two solid rocket boosters generate some 7.3 million pounds (3.3 million kilograms) of thrust at liftoff. America's first manned launch vehicle, the Redstone rocket, produced 78,000 pounds (35,381 kilograms) of thrust. That's just over 1 percent of the space shuttle's power.

  • If their heat energy could be converted to electric power, two boosters firing for two minutes only would produce 2.2 million kilowatt hours of power, enough to supply the entire power demand of 87,000 homes for a full day.

  These details highlight that the space shuttle is a staggering piece of technology, which uses enormous amounts of energy. Yet it pales into insignificance compared to the energy requirements needed to propel a spaceship at anywhere near light speed. It would require energy equal to 23 million atomic bombs to propel the space shuttle to 50 percent of the speed of light (c). At 90 percent of c, it requires the energy of 73 million atomic bombs, or 351 years of the combined power output of all U.S. energy facilities. Of course, once the spaceship reaches its intended destination, it will need to slow down. To stop the spaceship, it would require the same amount of energy as it took to get it moving. If the spaceship plans on returning back to Earth, it would need energy to speed up and slow down one more time. This means we need four times the original energy requirements listed above.[26]

  Quite simply, we do not have energy sources at our disposal that could achieve these goals. At the best speed of the Apollo craft, which took three days to get to the moon, it would take 870,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.[27]

  Warp factors

  This is a huge problem for the ETH because even at light speed, interstellar journeys would take millions of years. Visiting aliens would have to defy the known laws of physics. But we need not worry - science fiction to the rescue!

  Because our solar system is thought to be lifeless, science fiction writers have had to dream up strange new worlds or, as Captain Kirk from the Star Trek series said, "To boldly go where no man has gone before."

  In bemoaning the physical impossibility of faster-than-light travel, novelist Norman Spinrad was quoted as saying it is:

  ....a pain in the neck to science fiction writers. The literary necessity for faster-than-light travel is all too obvious. Without it, we could have no stories of galactic empires, not much anthropological science fiction, few pictures of alien cultures or outre [sic] planets, a dearth of first-contact stories - in short, science fiction writers would be pretty much confined to our own solar system.... Thus, hyperspace. Or overdrive. Or whatever it takes to get our literary spaceships from star to star in literarily usable time.[28]

  Most people are familiar with the expression "warp drive" (Star Trek), and other variations, such as "hyperspace" (Star Wars) or "folding space" (Dune). Here we see once again how science fiction has made its way into UFO lore, because faster-than-light travel is obviously presumed by supporters of the ETH (extraterrestrial hypothesis).

  To understand the concept of warp travel (much faster than c), we need to understand that space, although it is a vacuum, is not empty. It is a medium of some sort (scientists are still debating this). Some, like Einstein, call it the "ether." For example, for the light of a distant star to be able to reach the earth, it must travel through "something" -be transmitted through a medium, if you like. This medium is space, or ether. Although special relativity forbids faster-than-light travel within space-time, physicist Miguel Alcubierre of the University of Wales has theorized that space-time itself (the actual fabric of space) may be able to move faster. By expanding space-time behind the spaceship and forming an opposite contraction in front of it, you are in effect creating a wave or bubble of the space-time itself and riding it. Outside observers see motion faster than at the speed of light.[29] Imagine swimming at a certain speed. Now, catch a wave, and you can travel much faster than your original maximum speed.

  The expression "folding space" is best described like this. Imagine traveling from one end of a sheet of paper to the other. If you fold the paper in half so that the two ends meet, you have just shortened the distance or "warped" it. Applied to space travel, you are actually using energy to fold the space-time continuum. At least that's the theory. But to travel faster than light by warping or folding space, you have to invent some unknown exotic matter that could generate sufficient energy to warp space in the first place. The whole process is hypothetical and not (at present) testable.

  One proposal for exotic propulsion is a "matter to antimatter" power generator. Antimatter is the opposite of normal matter. That is, the electrons have a positive charge instead of a negative one (and are thus called positrons), and protons become antiprotons because they have a negative charge instead of a positive one. All of this produces an anti-atom.

  The website How Stuff Works explains antimatter this way:

  When antimatter comes into contact with normal matter, these equal but opposite particles collide to produce an explosion emitting pure radiation, which travels out of the point of the explosion at the speed of light. Both particles that created the explosion are completely annihilated - leaving behind other subatomic particles. The explosion that occurs when antimatter and matter interact transfers the entire mass of both objects into energy. Scientists believe that this energy is more powerful than any that can be generated by other propulsion methods.[30]

  Sounds simple, but the trouble is we cannot find any antimatter, except for tiny amounts in radioactive decay. According to the big-bang theory of how our universe came into existence, there should be equal amounts of antimatter as well as the normal matter that we actually observe (this is a serious objection to this popular view of the evolution of the universe, by the way). Scientists can make antimatter in the laboratory using particle accelerators and atom-smashing devices, but in a whole year, researchers can only produce enough antimatter to power a normal light bulb for a few seconds.

  Another theorized method of folding space is "wormholes." Wormholes are simply shortcuts that fold space (imagine taking a shortcut through the center of a ball rather than traveling along the surface). The trouble is, no one has ever seen one, and there is no reason to believe they exist. Like warp drive, they remain purely science fiction.

  Space is full of stuff!

  Even if the power problems could be solved, there are other serious hiccups for the viability of faster-than-light travel. Although there is a lot of empty "space" in space, there are also many objects, both large and small.

  • Ultra-high-speed collisions.

  It is estimated that there are 100,000 dust particles per cubic kilometer of space. At light speed (c=300,000 km per second), an impact with just one of these tiny objects would destroy a spaceship. Even at one-tenth the speed of light, the impact would be equivalent to about 10 tons of TNT.[31] Encountering a larger, say, pea-sized object while flying at just 50 percent of c would produce kinetic energy equal to 2.2 atomic bombs. Damage w
as caused to the space shuttle Challenger when in 1983 it hit a small paint flake with such force that it gouged a small crater in the front window (these windows were designed to be extremely robust).[32] The Hubble Space Telescope already has several holes in its structure after just 12 years circling the earth, traveling at just a fraction of the speeds required for galactic travel.

  Science fiction has invented concepts such as force fields and deflector shields to deal with these problems. Although some electrically charged objects can be deflected using electromagnetic fields, how such concepts could be applied to withstand impacts as large as multiple atomic bombs remains imaginary. This would only increase the energy requirements of the ship, too, because an equally powerful force would have to be generated to deflect such objects.

  • Detecting approaching objects.

  Traveling at ultra-high speeds makes detecting objects in your path virtually impossible. If you are warping at several times c, then some way of transmitting faster-than-light signals would have to be invented. Faster-than-light particles called "tachyons" have been theorized by many, but as far as we know they do not actually exist. According to Einstein, c is the maximum speed possible in the universe, but it would be impossible for any craft to achieve because it would require infinite energy to attain it. In addition, it would seem impossible to develop technology that could detect a grain of sand, for example, millions of light-years away.